An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Patron of Immigrants—Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Francis Xavier Cabrini as a young nun in Italy.

She
arrived in New York City in 1889 just
short of 40 years old, a frail and tinywoman accompanied by six of her sisters barely able to speak a word of English and with virtually no resources. Frances
Xavier Cabrini, Prioress of the Institute
of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, found a chilly welcome from Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who, like
many of the mainly Irish American
Catholic Bishops, was disdainful and distrustful of the waves of Italian immigrants who were piling up
on American shores. Rather than seeing them as potential reinforcements for the faith in a still largely Protestant and hostile nation, Corrigan thought of them as ignorant and dangerous
and a threat to Catholicism’s gradual and grudging acceptance. He found her
space in the partially empty convent
of the Sisters of Charity, and left
her to her own devices with little support—and frequent opposition—from the Archdiocese for her missionary work.

When
she died less than thirty years later the woman who came to be known simply as Mother Cabrini and her order had
established 67 institutions—orphanages, hospitals, schools, and convents in New York, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans; Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other locations. In addition there were more than 100 other in
Italy, and countries throughout Europe
and Latin America. Archbishop Corrigan and the rest of the
American Hierarchy eventually became
her admirers and supporters. Not bad for
a woman who originally had only wanted to become a missionary to the heathen
Chinese.

Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July
15, 1850, at Sant’Angelo Lodigiano
in the Province of Lodi, Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, of the Austrian Empire. Her father,
Agostino Cabrini was a prosperous cherry grower. Her very religious mother, the former Stella
Oldini raised her 11 children,
only four of whom lived to adulthood,
steeped in the Faith. Francesca, as she
was known, was the youngest of the family and always frail. After nursing siblings who died in a small
pox outbreak and contracting the disease herself, she was almost invalid.

Francesca
spent a lot of time with a favorite uncle, a priest, who encouraged her growing sense of vacation. As a child she constructed paper boats filled them with violets,
launching them on a canal by her
uncle’s church telling him the flowers were missionaries on their way to
China. At 12 she took a personal vow of perpetual virginity.

The
next year at the age of 13, Francesca enrolled in a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. She
graduated cum laude in 1868 with a teaching
certificate. But when she tried to
join the order, the sisters had to turn down their accomplished student on the
grounds that she was too frail for their life.

Instead
she took a teaching position and then became Headmistress of the House of
ProvidenceOrphanage in Codogno. In addition to teaching, Maria gathered a
religious community around her, drawing mostly on older girls from the
Orphanage. In 1877 she and seven of them
took religious vows together. She adopted the name Francesca Saverio Cabrini—Francis Xavier Cabrini—at that time in
honor of the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, Patron of missionary service.

Three
years later in 1880 Cabrini and her sisters formally founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of
Jesus, with her as the Superior
General of the order. Under her visionary leadership and administration skills, sisters grew
rapidly and within a few years had established seven orphan homes, a free school, and a nursery. They supported
their work through the sale of needle
work and fine embroidery
produced by the nuns and by students.
They also benefited from Mother Cabrini’s persuasive skills in soliciting donations from the wealthy.

This
work achieved the admiring attention of Giovanni
Scalabrini, Bishop of Piacenza who arranged for an interview with Pope Leo XIII. She expressed her childhood dream of being
allowed to become a missionary to China.
The Pope discouraged that idea.
Instead he suggested she consider moving her mission field to the United States where large numbers of
Italians were settling and where they had few priests to serve them and keep them loyal to the Church and where
they were mired in poverty and exploitation at near the bottom
rung—barely above Negros—of American society. “"Not to the East, but to the West,”
he admonished her.

It
took a few years for Cabrini to put the affairs of the Sisters in order in
Italy to keep up the work there and to raise the funds for the mission trip
with a nucleus of her sisters. They were
finally able to make the crossing in 1889.

The original Sacred Heart Orphan Asslyem at West Park, New York.

The
sisters began their work by teaching catechism
and general literacy—in Italian—classes
for the immigrants in New York City’s crowded slums. In an age where many
poor women died in childbirth, diseases
like tuberculosis cut short lives, industrial accidents took a heavy toll
on men and women alike, and when many men abandoned
their families, the sisters found many orphaned or abandoned children
living in the streets. Mother Cabrini
founded her first American orphanage for girls,
now known as the Saint Cabrini Home
in West Park, Ulster County New York. The grounds also included an academy, the American Mother House and Novitiate, and served as Cabrini’s principle home and headquarters
for the rest of her life.

The
property was sold to a rock bottom prices by the Jesuits who could find no water
on it. But legend has it that
Cabrini prayed to find a spring on the grounds and, seemingly miraculously after years of futile searching by the Jesuits an
ample, pure spring was found on a hillside where she first dug.

Concerned
with the appalling health care immigrants received, Mother Cabrini and the
sisters expanded their operations to hospitals
first opening Columbus Hospital
in New York City in 1892, a year of national
hoopla over the supposed discovery
of the New World by Italian hero
Christopher Columbus 400 years earlier.
The hospital merged with the Italian
Hospital (founded 1937) in 1973 to become the Cabrini Medical Center.

Chicago
became another important center for Mother Cabrini. She founded the large Italian immigrant
community there especially fertile ground and enjoyed more support from the
Archdiocese there than in New York. In
addition to establishing a large convent there and founded Assumption School on East
Erie Street in Streeterville and
Chicago Columbus Hospital in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood in
1905. Later she added Columbus Extension Hospital for the Poor on
the West Side. In her later years Chicago became a
virtual second home.

Mother
Cabrini, by this time famous and celebrated, became a naturalized American Citizen in
1907. Her example was said to have
encouraged a minor wave of naturalizations among the immigrants she served and
who adored her.

Mother Cabrini in maturity.

Cabrini
was a busy administrator and tireless fund raiser. She also made the arduous round trip trance-Atlantic crossing almost every year
for 30 years. On one such trip in 1915 Italy joined the Allied side in World War I with
the aim of reclaiming more Italian speaking regions from Austria—Cabrini’s home
in Lombardy had been annexed by the Kingdom
of Italy back in 1859. Cabrini threw
herself into organizing her hospitals and convents there in support of Italian
troops and providing medical care for the wounded
as well as relief for refugees. She was hailed as national heroine.

Mother
Cabrini made one more hazardous war-time
crossing back to Italy. But back in
Chicago on December 27, 1917 her fragile body succumbed to malaria in a room of her own Chicago Columbus Hospital. At her request she was buried on the grounds
of the Mother House in New York beside other sisters of her order. Back in Chicago, the room in which she died
became an unofficial shrine. It was
preserved just as it was on the day of her death and was visited annually by
thousands. Rumors of prayers answered
and cures began to be associated with it.

Responding
to the rumors of miracles and to the worshipful attention Mother Cabrini
continued to inspire in Chicago, Cardinal
George Mundelein initiated the Church investigation
leading to her official veneration,
the first step toward canonization. As part of that process her body was exhumed for inspection in 1931. In the
spirit of the ancient tradition of dismembering the body to be used as relics at church and shrines dedicated
to or associated with the dead, Mother Cabrini’s head was removed and preserved
in the chapel of the Congregation’s
internationalmotherhouseinRome. One
arm was severed and sent to
Chicago to a chapel adjacent to her death room at Columbus Hospital. The rest of her body was brought to a new
Shine constructed on the ground of the girls’ school she founded in New York
City at 701 Fort Washington Avenue.

In
1938 after a miracle involving the restoration
of sight to a child blinded by
the excess application of silver nitrate
to the eyes, Pope Pius XI raised
her to official veneration in a decree,
anointing her heroic virtues. After a second miracle involving the healing of a terminally ill nun was confirmed, Pope Pius XII officially canonized her on July 7, 1947. The whole process took an unusually short period of time, which reflected
the concern at the Vatican that the
United States, which had become one of the largest
Catholic countries in the world by population
as well as the wealthiest, was
vastly underrepresented on the Calendar
of Saints.

St. Cabrini made Patron of
immigrants, orphans, hospital administrators,
unlikely causes, and against
malaria. Her feast day is on November
13, the date of her beatification, rather than the more customary anniversary of
her ascent into Heaven (death.) This was probably due to the crowded nature of
the liturgical calendar during the Christmas Season.

IN
1955 Cardinal Samuel Stritch consecrated
the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier
Cabrini including her death room inside the Chicago Columbus Hospital.

Many
of the institutions Mother Cabrini founded are no longer functioning. State authorities and other institutions took
over many of the orphanages and closed them with the movement to placements in foster care or adoptions. Many of her schools fell victim to declining enrollments, including Mother Cabrini Catholic High School in New York where a separate shrine
was build on the grounds in 1957 and which shut its doors at the end of the
school year in 2014 after 111 years.

The National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini as it now stands alone in Chicago's Lincoln Park Neighborhood.

Her
hospitals could not survive the relentless pressure from ever-growing private, for profit hospital
conglomerates on one hand, and shrinking Medicare
and Medicaid payments for their
largely indigent patients. No amount of fundraising could save most of the hospitals first from rounds of merger and consolidation and then from closure. In late 2001, Chicago
Columbus Hospital closed its doors. A year later, the shrine and chapel inside
were also shuttered. The hospital building was demolished, but the Cabrini
National Shrine was a separate propertybelonging
to the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and was
preserved. After years of controversy
and heavy handed pressure to
relocate the Shrine so that the valuable Lincoln Park land could be profitablyredeveloped. After years of
haggling, agreement was made and a new luxury
condominium building was erected over and around the Shrine. After restoration the Shrine was blessed and dedicated byCardinalFrancis
George on September 30,
2012.

Meanwhile
in New York City, Cabrini Medical Center was forced to close in 2008. After an attempt by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center to turn the vacant buildings into a for-profit out-patient surgery center fell through,
the complex was sold to private developers who plan to convert the buildings to
condominiums.

For many people, Mother Cabrini is best remembered for
something she never personally had anything to do with—Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project. The projects were built out over a period
of twenty years beginning in 1944 with theFrances
CabriniRowhouses
on land cleared from some of the worst and most dangerous slums in the City, a
largely Italian neighborhood so rife
with crime that more than 50 murders
were committed in one year alone at Death
Corner, Locust and Sedgwick. Four additional sections of high rise buildings were finally
finished by 1964.

At first the development was integrated and most of its residents
were employed former slum residents
who took pride in being Development
People. But Mayor Richard J. Daly shifted the focus of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA)
to warehousing the very poor and reinforcing the city’s rigid racial
segregation. By the mid-‘70’s
Cabrini-Green was over-run by drugs,
gangs, and violence and the
building were allowed to deteriorate
with poor maintenance and vandalism. Many believe that it was allowed to happen
because the land juts into the intersection of two of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park
and the Gold Coast and was coveted by developers.

A new round of Public Housing “reform” has seen
the high rise buildings razed and their residents disbursed. The area is being re-developed, supposedly for
mixed income uses. The Cabrini row houses were preserved,
although their residents were all evicted.
They are now an up-scale anchor for
the planned development. No one expects
that any of the former Black residents will find space in the few units
reserved for low income residents.

Meanwhile the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus continue their work in the United States and around the
world. They remain dedicated serving the
needs of the poor and immigrants with health care, senior care, immigrant services and the like. They have taken a special interest in implementing
Catholic teachings on Social Justice and
ending world-wide human trafficking.